Blueberry Fields Forever

holding up under lots of rain, books I enjoyed, and a project I finally casted off

I barely pressed send on my monthly wrap-up when a deluge of rain hit the Green Mountain state and caused destruction. Images of farmers canoeing across farm fields, towns buried in the debris of swift moving waters, bookstores swollen and pregnant with unsellable books, wet walls, and bookshelves came flooding in. The library in our state’s capital is facing months of challenges ahead as the building’s operating systems were fully submerged in water, leaving the library in the dark and without airflow.

We woke up each day, wondering if the rivers rose more. Were the creeks overflowing to the point of cutting us off? I spent a Friday evening watching one side of the state glisten in summer evening sunshine while I turned my face to the Adirondacks and watched the wrath of God come towards us. Another thunderstorm. This time we had to pull out a bucket for a new-found leak in a sealed-off stove insert in our living room ceiling.

It’s made the warm and sunny days around here absolutely precious and we made sure to make the most of it. My daughter began her first swim lessons this summer, so we found ourselves at the pool as often as we could, practicing lying on our back, blowing bubbles in water, and getting comfortable with kicking our feet. On those drives back and forth from the state park pool, we found a lovely fruit stand selling fresh Hudson Valley peaches. We pulled them out and places them on brown paper bags to wait for them to ripen enough that we could peel them and serve them with whipped cream. But perhaps my favorite memory from July, the best of them all, was a trip into the Green Mountain National Forest for some spontaneous wild blueberry picking.

The beauty about wild blueberries is they really pack a punch when it comes to blueberry flavor. While it takes too long to pick enough to truly satisfy my appetite for them (plus, I want to be mindful of sharing with others including my bear friends), it’s worth the haul to get to the fields and spending hours picking these delightful gems.

After making muffins with these, I also tried these blueberry pie bars from Averie Cooks with some quick substitutions that I recommend trying. Swap the egg for 3 oz of room temp cream cheese and add your lemon flavoring to the filling (I really like opting for King Arthur Flour’s Lemon Juice Powder), and you are in for a treat.

As for reading, I have some thoughts to share on what I got to this past month. Finding time to read has been tricky, but when I did, these ones really held my attention.

Book I Read

Nora Goes Off Script by Annabel Monoghan - Louisa May Alcott wrote the young adult classic Little Women to give her family financial security. Nora Hamilton writes strikingly sweet and simple scripts for the likes of a fictional Hallmark channel to keep her family afloat with her “too-good-for-traditional-jobs” husband. That is until Nora’s marriage ends in a way that isn’t often seen in family dramas or fiction. There are no egregious conflicts or intense unraveling of two lives enmeshed. It all seems rather uneventful for such an occasion.

When Nora exhumes the remains of her marriage for her art, she creates a script that no longer fits the bill for her traditional work. It’s time for the silver screen for Nora’s words, and this also means that production for the film wants to use part of Nora’s property to film the movie. Enter a strikingly good-looking actor who Nora meets with a lot of assumptions (thank you, Jane Austen), and commence a small-town romance that smokes slowly until it burns with the aching tension might remind some of an early Nicholas Sparks novel. Monoghan really takes what could become a very sweet and simple love story and fills out the cracks and crevices with some compelling ideas and themes to consider. It nicely evades genres with it’s subject matter, structure, and tonal ambiguity no matter what marketing says. While I wished for a bit more digging into our lead characters and their interiority, it delivered on a endearing, comforting story.

Do Tell by Lindsay Lynch - I’m a Golden Hollywood kid. I was afforded the opportunity to watch countless hours of cinema classics like Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, Oklahoma, Singing in the Rain, Meet Me in St. Louis, and Easter Parade, thanks to being raised in an intergenerational household with my grandma. So when the publishing world announces a new book that aims to examine the era, I’m eager to get my hands on a copy.

Do Tell is structured as a memoir told through the eyes of Edie O’Dare, or Edith O'Shaughnessy before her Hollywood transformation, and her recollections of living through this era. Edie unravels the story of how she finds herself in Hollywood becoming a mid-tier actress who uses her wit and social currency to gain information she can sell to a gossip column to make ends meet. What O’Dare doesn’t bargain for is being charged with helping a young woman tell her story of being assaulted by one of the studio’s A-list celebrities. What Edie does with this information and how she navigates her role in sharing the “secrets” of the Hollywood elite become the lynchpin to the storylines of our cast of characters.

The premise for Do Tell is based off a real Hollywood actor and his alleged assault of two minor women. More so, there was a sense that Lynch was not pushing our modern philosophies on a historical work (something she address in an essay she wrote on writing the novel for Lit Hub). I also thought the novel does a phenomenal job grounding the fictional world by interweaving the cast, it’s fictional movie studio, and the events that transpire with real-world studios and actors of days gone by. To say much more would be to give away the process of the novel, which I think is better left behind drawn curtains until read. But, to be clear: Do Tell has quickly found it’s way next to my other old Hollywood favorite by one of my favorite writers—Laura Lamont’s Life in Pictures by Emma Straub.

Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law by Mary Roach - Each time Mary Roach announces the next subject for her next book, I feel like the subject matter is selected the same way chefs on cooking game shows have zany ingredients or challenges thrown at them when they are told to create a masterpiece dish in 30-minutes. For Mary, it’s just a couple of years of research and the ensuing process of finding the narrative thread on a subject with enough material weight to hold a book. NBD.

When Fuzz was announced in 2021 as Roach’s latest work, I was intrigued and highly suspicious of how this could be a book. Human and wildlife conflict? Animals breaking the law? I had my side-eye on Mary because the premise was confounding. But the secret sauce to any of Roach’s work is picking out-of-the-box subjects that leave us scratching our head for a bit until we sit down with her words and she can begin the work of disarming us all with her wit and intelligence. It isn’t long before that the pieces of Roach’s research begin to click into place with each other, building a complex narrative puzzle on a topic with a lot of ethical considerations for the readers.

While Fuzz isn’t exactly narrative nonfiction, Roach’s individual essays have an episodic nature to them that gives the distinct feeling of hearing a story from one of your highly intelligent friends. She also delineates how she moves to her next question, connecting each essay through the personal thought processes of where her curious mind leads her. It certainly would make for a fascinating discussion about the process of discovery and developing your next question from. But perhaps, what I loved the most as a facts nerd was just how factually dense the work was while remaining incredibly accessible and intriguing of a read for the general public.

Off The Needles

I finally finished my crop top I referenced working on in my May wrap-up, and I like the result! (Here is the link to the pattern.)

Next up for me is my transition into fall knitting, so for now I’m working on a shawl from Interweave Knits’ 2012 Jane Austen collection, named after the spunky Margaret Dashwood.

I’d love to hear what you’re reading, knitting, or working on now as we wrap up these days of summer, so leave me a comment below. Until then, happy adventures in reading!

-Katie